Principal AI Platform Engineer

## Who we are VOIS (Vodafone Intelligent Solutions) is a strategic arm of Vodafone Group Plc, creating value for customers by delivering intelligent solutions through Talent, Technology & Transformation. As the largest shared services organisation in the global telco industry with 30,000 FTE, our portfolio of next-generation solutions and services are designed in partnership with customers across Vodafone Group, local markets, and partner markets to simplify and drive growth. With our strategic partner Accenture, we work alongside our Vodafone customers, other Telco and tech companies to drive transformation, meet the challenges of our industry and ensure we stay relevant and resilient. This partnership is a unique, industry-first model which brings together the best of in-house and 3rd party capability. We work with customers across 28 countries from 10 VOIS locations: Albania, Egypt, Hungary, India, Romania, Spain, Turkey, UK, Germany, Ireland, and with a network of teams in Czech Republic, Italy, Greece, and Portugal. #VOIS #BeUnrivalled #CreateTheFuture ## Location London, Paddington ## About this Role We are seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to define and lead the technical direction of an AI-native Internal Developer Platform. This role focuses on enabling product and engineering teams to build, deploy, operate, and continuously improve software safely and efficiently at scale. The position drives the creation of self-service capabilities, reusable engineering patterns, and AI-assisted workflows that enhance developer experience, strengthen governance, and improve delivery performance across Vodafone’s cloud ecosystem. ## What you’ll do * Define and evolve the technical roadmap for the Internal Developer Platform, treating it as a product with clear adoption, reliability, and developer experience outcomes. * Design and deliver self-service capabilities, reusable golden paths, and standard service templates to simplify service provisioning and operations. * Contribute to cloud-native platform architecture, including compute, Kubernetes, networking, secrets management, observability, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code. * Integrate AI-assisted engineering workflows to support faster delivery, improved code quality, automation, and data-driven operational decisions. * Establish governance, security, and compliance guardrails through policy-as-code and auditable platform patterns. * Improve platform reliability using SLOs, observability practices, resilience engineering, and insights from incidents. * Collaborate with product, engineering, security, and architecture teams to align platform capabilities with business priorities and user needs. * Drive efficiency and sustainability through automation, standardisation, and FinOps-informed engineering practices. ## Who you are * An experienced professional in designing and operating internal developer platforms, cloud-native platforms, or large-scale distributed systems within complex enterprise environments. * A technical specialist with expertise across cloud platforms, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, observability, service networking, and platform security. * A capable software engineer with proficiency in at least one modern programming language such as Python, Go, or Java, and experience building platform APIs and developer tooling. * An advocate for AI-native engineering practices, including AI-assisted development, automation, and intelligent operations. * Familiar with platform-as-a-product principles, developer experience optimisation, and adoption measurement. * Skilled in defining reliability objectives, SLOs, monitoring, alerting, and driving improvements through incident learnings. * Able to engage and influence senior stakeholders, mentor team members, and translate complex strategies into scalable solutions. * Demonstrates strong problem-solving, communication, stakeholder management, and continuous improvement...